A combination of computer generated paper reports and manually generated spreadsheet inventory queues were used in the past for the presentation of accounting reports to credit card acquiring systems. A problem with this approach is that the labor intensive process of combining the reports and the spreadsheets is directly proportional to the level of transaction volume. This is a constraint to future growth in terms of labor resources, facilities, and the amount of time required to manually compile and track the data. Another problem with this approach is that because of the numerous information sources (reports and spreadsheets) there is no single (centralized) source for work of an acquiring's settlement position.
What is needed is an on-line method of providing a secured, on-line access of daily settlement information via the World Wide Web (WWW) for acquiring bank clients.